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Things that don’t fit anywhere else!

Speaker Cable Sizing – By the numbers

During a recent reshuffle of all the rooms of the house, I found myself going through the laborious process of moving my office, and all the equipment therein. Part of this meant rewiring my monitor speakers. While I was doing this, I didn’t have enough speaker cable, it was too late to go out and get some, and I was too impatient to order some on the internet and wait for it to arrive. What to do? I went into my store cupboard and grabbed myself a length of 1.5mm2 flexible cable, and hooked the speaker up using it. Having plugged in…
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I hate Lexmark… About as much as this cat!

I have never had a good relationship with Lexmark printers since the 3000 series from the late 90’s. Sadly they seem to have remembered this and are now determined to frustrate me on a daily basis. Today I needed to print a label onto a C5 envelope, so I tell it to pick the envelope up from the manual paper feeder, I position the envelope and hit the print button for it to say “Insert media in paper loader” !!!!!!!! There’s a bloody envelope here, pick the bloody thing up and print on it! No wait, “Error: Guide rails not…
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A gadget for the bloody minded…

Do you find yourself arguing with electronics? Are you bloody minded and refuse to give up? Well perhaps this isn’t the gadget for you! Introducing the Useless Box from ThinkGeek. There’s not much else I can say, so watch the video and then tell me if you can think of anything less useful. My submission is any Apple device.

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Back to school: The start of 6.002x

As I mentioned a couple of weeks back, I signed up for a free online self-study course in Circuits and Electronics, run by MIT under the MITx programme. Today the course started and I wish to say one thing should my Electronics teachers ever see this (David Brooker or Paul Abbot) half of what the course covers I have never seen before. When it comes to pure maths, my skills are pretty week, fortunately Google has been able to help me answer some of the questions, which so far concern looking at discrete abstractions based on the V-I relationship. From…
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Updated: MIT to launch free online study courses

According to the BBC, next month, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) will begin offering a free online course in 6.002x: Circuits and Electronics through its fully automated MITx programme. From the looks of it, it’ll be free to join from anywhere in the world, and those that complete it successfully will receive a certificate, while MIT students can complete the course as part of their degree. Apparently there are plans to offer more courses in a wide range of subjects once this initial trial has completed. They say that there are no formal entry requirements for the course other than…
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Fail: Action Pad Advert

When I was in Taiwan, I saw this advert for an Android Tablet and was so amazed by the tastelessness of it that I burst out laughing. Of course the tablet is going to be rubbish, but I like it for their advertising campaign featuring Steve Job’s angel! So here it is on YouTube. What can you say except bizarre?

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